We had Dan Rose from A9.com (search subsidy of Amazon.com) as a visitor in CIIR today, who gave a talk titled ‘Lessons and Challenges from Product Search’. Throughout his talk, he listed the factors makes product search different from typical web search problem, how A9 approaches some of these issues, and future challenges. Here I […]

HCIR’11 was like a great school to me. I always felt that a good 1-day workshop can be better than week-long conferences, yet this was a special opportunity for me who is trying to extend my horizon to more user-conscious part of IR research. Gary’s keynote was particularly enchanting, providing a good overview on HCIR […]

I’ve written several papers as a grad student, and it feels like I’ve learned a bit about paper writing over the last 4 years. Looking back, however, I feel that my research has followed several patterns found in information retrieval research. In other words, it’s not easy to speak of something as ‘my own research style’. […]

Keyword Search, Associative Browsing and Faceted Navigation are three major techniques of information access. Google provide search, browsing (find-similar links) and navigation (filtering by time and types), and there exists many domain-specific collections of structured data (e.g., Amazon, IMDB and Yelp!) which supports all three methods in different forms. In this post, I’ll compare these method, and consider ways to […]

I read a paper from FXPAL on a new framework and system of exploratory search. It’s been months since I read it, yet I want make a connection with my recent work here. They characterize exploratory search as follows: Exploratory search is often characterized by an evolving information need and the likelihood that the information […]

PRM-S (Probabilistic Retrieval Model for Semistructured Data) is a novel retrieval model for structured documents — i.e. XML documents or emails. My previous works show its effectiveness in the IMDB collection [1], and also in the TREC email known-item finding task [2]. (I have blogged about the model before) Recently I got requests for codes implementing […]

I will be interning at CLUES (Context, Learning, and User Experience for Search) group at Microsoft Research Redmond. My mentor is Kevyn Collins-Thompson and my manager is Susan Dumais. As most of you may know, CLUES specializes on research in the area spanning IR, HCI and Machine Learning, which is a good fit with my intention […]